


Burning Man's Ball

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Costume Parties & Masquerades, Dancing, First Time, Jack/Daniel Ficathon, M/M, Older Characters, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Sex Club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 05:28:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2179668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel visits an exclusive, clandestine Washington D.C. sex party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Man's Ball

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joy/gifts).



A dark sedan with ordinary plates picked Daniel up at a neutral location and disgorged him twenty minutes later onto a deserted street in the halfhearted freezing rain of what passed for winter in the Midatlantic states. The car pulled away in a slushy swish as Daniel crunched across broken glass to the only entrance within view.

The building was the shell of a former factory in the ghost of an industrial district that even squatters no longer deemed habitable. The scarred, graffitied steel door answered Daniel's knock with silence but admitted him on his first turn of the knob. A short gray hallway lined with wrecked, doorless offices and floored with grit-graven linoleum led to an L-bend around which waited an elevator with gate and fittings restored to lustrous condition. The operator, his _medico della peste_ dress unnervingly macabre even though Daniel had expected a Carnival theme, reached a gloved hand to take the textless black business card Daniel presented, raised and tilted it to examine its holographic laminate, and handed it back with a gesture for Daniel to enter. The burnished accordion gate extended almost soundlessly, the cloaked operator slid the controller handle along its groove, and the elevator bore them upward in a silken glide.

Standing just inside the gate, Daniel caught a scent of camphor and lemon balm from the operator's mask, an intriguing touch of historicity. No period music, though; the shaft carried down to them the unmistakable cool purity of Miles Davis's Harmon mute, and their rising gave the impression of the rest of the instruments swelling into existence around that silver thread of sound as the music became fully audible. The operator halted the elevator at what Daniel judged to be the top floor of the eight-story building, six dead yawning spaces having scrolled past the gate as they rose; jogged the car flush with the bottom of a brushed-steel inner door; and folded the gate back.

Daniel pushed through the doorway into a cone of light from a soft overhead spot and the shadow-sense of a large, crowded area beyond it. High-end audio equipment projected "So What" at a volume just too high to comfortably speak over, but there was no ambient noise of conversation or clinking cocktail ice, and something was subtly dampening the music. Textiles, he realized, so new that he could smell them; lush carpet underfoot, thick hangings on the walls, a quick and convenient way to transform a broken, boarded-up factory floor into a luxurious, even decadent space. He could make out dappled figures swaying on a pale wood dance floor now, lit as if by moonlight through breeze-ruffled foliage, within a circle of hip-high oblongs that must be sofas, and a dark parting in the far right side of the drapery beyond it. A twist and glance at the elevator wall behind him resolved the draping as upholstery velvet, in the same deep red as the carpet, neither of them cheap. The clandestine forces of the capital's special interests could afford all kinds of expensive masks for their transient affairs.

What appeared to be a youth in _servetta muta_ mask and ruffled Elizabethan motley appeared at his left and showed a stockinged leg, one arm bent neatly behind his back, the other extended. To receive his coat, Daniel understood. He shrugged it off and draped it over the proffered arm. The youth withdrew into a silk-hung corner booth. Daniel waited at the edge of the spotlight, letting his eyes adjust better before he tried to navigate through the shifting shadows, giving the guests a chance to thoroughly evaluate him. _Carnevale_ meant 'good-bye to meat.' This, apparently, was hello.

The building occupied half a block, and these lofts typically took up entire floors, but the area visible here accounted for at most two-thirds of that, which implied the existence of other rooms or sections beyond the draped passage in the far corner. Possibly a bar slash smoking area, since the modest tables against the walls to right and left held only ranks of bottled water, and he caught more than a faint whiff of the fine tobacco whose pale smoke gave substance to the light cone he stood in; and assuredly some space for more explicit, if not private, activity than he was seeing on the dance floor.

When it seemed clear that no coat chit would be forthcoming and he'd stood in the spotlight long enough, he moved into the chiaroscuro. 

The space between the walls and the ring of sofas made a useful promenade. He fell in with the slowly circling movement of the counterclockwise strollers and made a desultory circuit, taking inventory of the dancers, checking out the clockwise strollers as they passed, accepting the brush of shoulders without leaning either in or away, trying and failing to get a glimpse through the dark opening in the drapes, getting a feel for the room's dynamic while he did what he'd come here to do. Speaking was clearly taboo, silence being as critical to anonymity as the requisite masks. Although he was getting some looks he wasn't sure about, he seemed to pass inspection; he'd dressed as instructed, slicked back his hair instead of chalking it to match the outfit, and chosen a faux-antique porcelain mask with colorless lips and painted-on crazing.

The costumes were, unsurprisingly, as fine as the appointments. Tailored coats and tunics, doublets and waistcoats; ample silk, froths of lace, what looked to be impressively period-conscious fabrics; expensive headwear and wildly expensive wigs and fine leather gloves and footwear. The masks were more subdued than he'd expected -- none of the gaudy synthetics you'd pick up on the Piazza San Marco or Bourbon Street or around the Sambódromo, no glittering works of art imported from fine Venetian shops -- and he supposed that the neutrality of plainness was an aid to anonymity as well as an expression of class. But the costumes also seemed to fall into two distinct categories, and those categories had some bearing on social interaction that he couldn't define after twenty minutes of strolling observation.

Aristos and Zannis, he dubbed them as he ventured inside the dance circle to lounge open-legged on a couch: aristocrats from the royal courts of the Renaissance to the Regency, and characters from the _commedia dell'arte_ and its theatrical and Carnival descendants. The Aristos, whatever the period of costume, wore gilded leather _larva_ masks, with or without the full _bauta_ rig; the Zannis wore classical character and animal masks of leather or papier-mâché and dressed in baggy whites or brightly lozenge-patterned surcoats and hose. The assumption that the Aristos were the movers and shakers this party was for and the Zannis were ringers or professional hires was facile and didn't quite fit; the Zannis preened and flirted and danced like anyone else in a pickup scene, not as a display for Aristos' enjoyment. But some of the Zannis' legs and feet were still damp from the rain, whereas every Aristo was bone-dry; and since he'd arrived, only Zannis had come out of the elevator he'd come up in.

If the side he'd been delivered to was the service entrance -- suggesting a less dingy/more covert way in for the Aristos, including somewhere to don their masquerade attire to avoid being sighted _in maschera_ outside -- then why had he been directed to wear 'Vandyck of solid color and good make' rather than issued expensively accurate _commedia_ garb or left to grab an off-the-shelf Pierrot or Harlequin suit from the nearest costume supplier?

High up as he might be in the now-public Stargate Program, and well-off as it had made him by his own broke-academic standards, he was by no stretch a Washington power broker. So: Desirable enough because of his position in this month's flavor of pie-worth-getting-a-political-finger-in, buff enough to rate as a rentboy? He'd take the compliment, if that was it; his forties were catching up with him. But he thought there was something else involved, and he couldn't tell if it was relevant to his purpose.

Well, he'd make the best use he could of his liminal status. As the music jumped from hard bop into the fusion era, he reached out from his lazy sprawl to snag the hand of a passing Arlecchino, on his way off the dance floor after his Regency partner reached for someone new. He could see only a glint of passing light reflected through the arched eyeholes of the leather half-mask, but the evaluation was palpable: Was he a Zanni or an Aristo, this Gainsborough's Blue Boy who'd emerged from the rear elevator? Daniel rose while he was still trying to figure it out, and moved him onto the dance floor with a shift of weight.

It had been a long time since he'd danced, longer since he'd been up close and personal in a full-frontal way. He felt himself moving more awkwardly than he'd have liked, and corresponding hitches in his partner's motion, uncertainties still evident. But Daniel led, and although it was only jazzy slow-dancing, this Arlecchino knew how to follow a firm frame, and how to grind back as subtly as he was being ground against, and if he was anywhere near as surprised as Daniel was that Daniel wasn't hardening, it didn't transmit through his body.

Daniel stuck with him for the duration of the song, continuing to scan the room with his head twisted a hair off face-on, and stepped back when the next number started, what he'd observed to be the wordless indication of an intent to switch partners. The Arlecchino backed off -- with a hint of a bow to be on the safe side, indicating that Daniel remained a conundrum -- and Daniel ran his hand lightly down the arm of a stocky Pedrolino who'd just been cut loose. As they danced the next song, the floor grew more crowded and the partner-switching grew more fluid. He danced the head of the next number with a cat-masked Gnaga in full drag, picked up a different Arlecchino for the improvisation, swapped partners with a pair of Columbinas during the bridge. All the groin rubs were polite, interrogatory. No hard-on and no sparkage distracted him from his continuous scanning.

His next partner, a Brighella in a greenish half-mask and matching starburst contact lenses, lifted his chin in a bid for attention, then held Daniel's gaze pointedly while he turned his face to the left. Not the head tilt that Daniel was hoping for, that would say _Let's take this somewhere more private_. In the strange wordless context of subtle body language, a direct question: _You looking for someone?_

The man of my dreams, Daniel would have quipped if he could. He couldn't tell if the question was an offer of help, a probe for information, or a warning to lay off casing the joint because people were starting to notice. He took it for all three, and smiled with his eyes, and shook his head. He dropped frame to move his hands down, for the first time, to a partner's hips, and put his focus into what he was feeling, trying to rub himself erect. He failed, although he elicited an impressive response from the Brighella, who'd moved his hands up when Daniel's moved down, and was feeling up the muscle in his arms and shoulders. When the number started winding down, he gave the guy a rueful cock of his head, his mind on a tangent as it came to him how many of the Zannis were wearing theatrical contacts but no eye makeup, wondering what kind of message was being sent by his plain brown lenses and heavily lined lids -- both intended to make him less recognizable from mid-distance, the most he figured he'd need. As the next number started, the Brighella regained his full attention by very deliberately going to work on him, saying _You just let me take care of that_ with a busy hand.

Daniel was happy to let him, since there was enough about him to question at this point without also failing to sport a boner. He'd wanted to blend in, and he didn't seem to be doing that very well. More new arrivals had come through the check-out-the-meat portal of the rear elevator, but they weren't attracting the same density of cluster on the dance floor, and none of them had gone unescorted through the draped door. The powdered heads of Colonial governors and Louis Quatorze courtiers swiveled to watch him, and the Aristos sometimes left their partners to cut in on other couples, but no one poached a partner from him and no one cut in to dance with him. He'd fallen into some kind of mystery niche.

He was attracting too much attention out here, and what he was looking for wasn't on the dance floor. A scent of cannabis was insinuating itself through the musk and the perspiration. He felt mildly inebriated, drunk on shadowplay and body contact, brain buzzing with jazz, high on the smoke and the sweat. He wasn't thinking as clearly as when he'd arrived, and he still wasn't getting hard. Was it possible he'd gone without intimate contact for so long that he'd trained his body to respond only to itself? He tried to focus on the Brighella's lean hardness, remember what it was that he'd loved about men before he'd ever fallen in love. The smoke was making his contacts scratchy even without anyone lighting up around the dance floor, and he was going to have to chug a bottle of water soon, and he had no clue where the bathroom might be, and there was his mind wandering again instead of appreciating the steely thighs against his thighs, the muscled ass under his hands. He wasn't even dancing anymore, just shuffling his weight, and the rubbing grope was actually getting a little irritating.

Time to take the plunge and go up front, escorted or solo. Hope he could get a good enough look around before they kicked him out or he had to waste ten minutes blowing somebody and possibly miss spotting his target. Hope there was only one section up front, a single equivalent of a back room, not a lounge he didn't rate entry to or a bunch of private alcoves he couldn't stake out. He recaptured eye contact with the Brighella, jerked his chin towards the doorway, and gave what he hoped was an encouraging nod. _Come on, buddy, say yes. You can suck me up and I promise I'll shoot like a cannon as soon as I've had my look around._

Instead of returning a nod or a headshake, the Brighella went tense and his starburst eyes blinked wide. A gloved hand was coming around Daniel's right shoulder to give the cutting-in tap, but the Brighella was already backing out of Daniel's embrace, groping for the security of a big bruiser of a Pantalone, turning his back.

Daniel felt Jack slide into the vacated space and take him firmly in hold.

 _No,_ Daniel thought, a universe of miscalculation and misjudgment boiled down to one silent syllable of protest, crying denial into the causal void as if his will had power to negate the event in progress, _no this is not happening_ , even as the softest of groans pushed from his diaphragm up through his throat and died in his closed mouth, an unsuppressible, reflexive response to the press of that body against his, a half-voiced, half-voiceless prayer of affirmation, _oh god yes_.

Chick Corea gave way to Stan Getz, and Jack's flawless frame and balanced weight slid them into a leisurely, effortless rumba.

He followed Jack's lead on autopilot, as if he were floating outside his body, startled loose from his moorings and clicking into observer mode to compensate. Part of his mind decided that he _was_ experiencing a secondhand high, and set about armoring him against giving anything away in case it turned out that Jack hadn't made him, but was just exercising alpha privilege to claim the mystery Blue Boy for himself. Part of his mind was planning his exit -- too fast would make it obvious that it was Jack he'd been looking for, too slow would give the pain time to catch up with him -- and simultaneously scrambling to commit to memory all the sensations he couldn't process right now, so that he could take them out later, when this was over and he was safe, and let himself feel them, and let them go. Part of his mind was objectively cataloguing the data of Jack's appearance -- gilded leather _larva_ mask, _bauta_ tricorn and mantle, _tabarro_ cloak clasped in silver at the neck and thrown back over the shoulders, linen shirt, no surcoat, no cravat; golden-iris contact lenses that were seriously _fucking_ creepy but not, no matter what his mildly stoned brain was trying to tell him, actual glowy Goa'uld eyes -- and examining it in the context of what he'd learned about this place. All it told him was that either his inferences were flawed or Jack was presenting as deliberately interstitial.

Part of his mind was saying, in so many clear, bewildered words, _So it was true._

Jack moved them fluidly around the floor with minimal motion. No turns, no flourishes, nothing at all but the basic figure repeated over and over again, as simple and thoughtless as walking. Daniel had seen him dance before -- at weddings, at the SGC's tenth-anniversary gala, at Cassie's college prom. He knew that Jack could be a flamboyant and playful dancer when he let loose, smiling and enjoying himself. He knew that Jack picked up physical skills as easily as he picked up languages, and he knew that Jack had learned to dance in order to socialize at military functions. He knew so very much about Jack. But he hadn't known this, and when he asked Jack about the rumor and Jack blew him off, strongly suggesting that it had a factual basis, he hadn't believed it.

Jack would never be this reckless. Jack would never be this _stupid_.

Jack had better at home, and knew it, and if he didn't want it, there were a dozen ways to get whatever he did want with no one the wiser.

But here he was.

 _God **damn** it, Jack._ Anger roused him from his sleepdancing. Jack's creepy golden eyes were fixed on the molded porcelain that fronted for his face. With the two inches' difference in their height, his own dark-lensed, liner-reshaped eyes would be in shadow. He lifted his chin to an autocratic angle and met Jack's eyes. _Recognize me, big guy?_ Zero reaction; Jack just kept moving them around the crowded floor, steady and relentless, steering without looking, expressionless gaze locked with his through their expressionless masks.

He couldn't have specified how he knew it was Jack. The eyes, though they were Jack's in shape, in the length and curve of lashes, weren't conclusive; what he could feel with his body -- rangy build, desk-job spread over dense muscle -- could belong to any fighting man of Jack's age and position. If he'd seen him first, he'd have recognized the carriage and the mannerisms, but he'd known him without seeing, known him with visceral certainty the instant the long body clamped against his. They'd worked and eaten and slept and suffered and died and fought together for seven years, lusted after each other for more than double that, tried and failed to break their bond in every possible and impossible way. They knew everything about each other except how it would feel to dance like this, standing up or lying down.

He said the words to himself in his head: _This is how he would fuck._ Steadily, smoothly, the quintessence of relaxed control. All these years daydreaming, speculating, resigned to never knowing, resolved to never ruin Jack by finding out, and here it was. Horizontal desire incarnate in its vertical expression.

He'd been hard since their first pass across the floor, Jack's close hold and fluent hip action producing an effortless erection. Jack's substantial package was pressed against his, silk breeches cupping them in place through every lateral roll of hips. It was eminently possible that he would orgasm right here on the dance floor. Not a scenario that had figured in any of those fantasies, rubbed off in a masked rumba during a surreal back-alley ball for the closeted beltway. Jack would not let him miss a step while it was happening.

Deeply, burningly angry and harder than he'd been in years, he deliberately exaggerated the Cuban hip roll to rake his cock and balls across Jack's, and see who lost it first.

Jack stopped them both dead in their tracks, something like rage flaring in his eyes. He ground his pelvis into Daniel's, punishingly hard, and then stepped back with a push to hold Daniel in place. For three harsh breaths they stood frozen in each other's grip; then, with a twitch of his head that could have been either disgust or surrender, Jack took another step away, caught Daniel's left hand in his right, and set off for the parted drapes, winding a sinuous, unstoppable path through the sway of bodies.

Daniel let himself be led. The front room was where this had to go, wherever it went from there. Past the opening was a black velvet hanging, making a right angle with the right-hand wall and creating a vestibule to screen the area beyond from view of the dance floor. Around it to the left was just another large, draped room, thick with smoke and the scents of spunk and lube and latex, lit in pulsating darkroom-red light. Bodies rubbed and thrust on couches, against the walls; along a polished stretch of bar tended by two more Plague Doctors, half a dozen Zannis and Aristos sat on a row of high stools and drank and smoked and watched in silence, Aristos sipping top-shelf liquor under the angled-out bottoms of their gilded masks, Zannis drinking freely. Beyond the bar was another black hanging and no doubt, somewhere beyond it, the alternative entrance he'd posited. Tables against the near wall to his right and the wall opposite it, where the water tables stood in the dance area, were neatly stocked with rows of toys, bottles of lube, baskets of condoms, bowls of pills. Fresh folded towels were stacked at the ends of the sofas, and a _servetta muta_ was unobtrusively moving around the area collecting used ones and picking up discarded toys and tissues.

The first Arlecchino he'd danced with was bent naked over a sofa back, one hand braced on the seat while a pantless Lord Nelson pounded into him, the other hand on his mask to keep it from jarring off his head. An indeterminate eighteenth-century Spanish monarch knelt on the seat next to his braced arm, thrusting into the mouth of a seated Zanni in a pig-snouted _gnaga_ mask, both of them fully dressed; the _gnaga_ Zanni had flung an arm past the King of Spain's thigh and was pinching the Arlecchino's nipples in time with the thrusts. Daniel blinked, took stock of what elements of costume the other couples having sex were still wearing, and thought, _Wow, it's been way too long if it was this obvious and I missed it._

The Zannis he'd been dancing with could be some of the most powerful men in Washington. It was as simple as top and bottom. As simple as masks that left your mouth accessible and masks that didn't, and contact lenses that compensated for the hit to anonymity. If he hadn't been a ball of rage with an aching hard-on, he'd have laughed.

Jack's hand was on the back of his neck, holding him still, letting him look, maybe making him watch; asserting possession. In a minute, either they'd fuck or they wouldn't. If they didn't, Jack might not leave with him; and so they would, and then he'd collect his coat while Jack changed into street clothes, and they'd go out the exit Jack had come in through. Jack would make a call, and a dark sedan with ordinary plates would pick them up and deliver Daniel back to some safe nondescript location, where he could call or flag a taxi to take him home to Georgetown while Jack went to Arlington or whatever after-hours place he liked to sit and brood in these days. On Monday, work would be no different from any other day; and a few days later, or a week, they'd have it out somewhere, in vicious privacy, and Daniel would tell him how close he'd come to crashing and burning, and what Daniel had done, would do, would get a start on doing as soon as he walked out of here, to silence the whispers. And that he would never do it again.

He had the cachet. It would cost him all of it. He didn't care; absent another global alien threat and politicians obstructing their response to it, he had nothing to spend it on, and he'd use it for Jack even if he did. He'd do anything for Jack. Give Jack everything he had. But this was it; if there was a next time, there'd be nothing more that he could do.

Jack's head turned, bringing the mask's impenetrable visage to bear on him. He turned his to Jack. He could have smiled behind it, stuck his tongue out, made faces; he could have bared his teeth in a snarl or mouthed the words _I love you_. It had made no difference for sixteen years. No reason it should make a difference now.

He pivoted to put his body between Jack and the rest of the room, shoved him into the draped wall, and went to his knees.

 _Should have picked up that Pierrot costume,_ he thought, as he palmed Jack's erection with one hand and reached up with the other to push the fucking mask off his face and free his mouth.

Jack's gloved hand caught and bent his rising hand in a grip so sudden and brutally tight that it paralyzed his whole body. The tightness was anger, or possibly panic; with half the pressure, he could use that grip to turn Daniel's body in any direction he pleased. Daniel still had a hand on the bulge at his crotch, and if he'd gotten the breeches open first, or been able to do anything but keep the arm attached to the other hand completely still, it would have been something of a standoff. As it was, he could only follow the arm up as Jack drew him back to eye level.

He jerked in startlement when Jack tapped his mask. Jack did it again, shaking his head. _You do not take that off your face._ Daniel gave a slow nod. It was like communicating with an Easter Island moai from the inside of a bisque doll. Jack cocked his head at an angle midway between warning and query and gestured towards the exit with his thumb.

Daniel shook his head. No, he wasn't leaving. If Jack was getting off tonight, it was fucking well going to be with him. What he did the next time, if there was a next time, was not Daniel's problem, but Daniel was here now, and Jack had made this physical, and that was how this was going to go. If Jack's kink was anonymous sex, that could be arranged some other way, some other time. For now he'd have to be satisfied with pretending the guy in the mask was a stranger. At this very moment it was close enough to true.

With his free hand, Jack swept his hat off in a gesture of profound exasperation and tossed it aside. Daniel twitched, but the mask wasn't attached to the hat, only the mantle, and Jack's hair was slicked back the same as his, maybe oiled or maybe just saturated with sweat, either way several shades darker than its usual distinguishing salt-and-pepper. Jack dropped the wrist lock and grabbed a double handful of the front of Daniel's costume, and Daniel found himself spun around Jack and against the wall, their positions reversed in a move as smooth and powerful as any dance turn. There was some kind of wainscoting behind the drapery, pressing his lower back, and something vertical and tubular against one shoulderblade, old factory fittings that hadn't been scavenged and the party planners hadn't bothered to remove. Jack's left hand was splayed on his chest, right hand digging around for the fastenings at the front of his breeches. He seemed to be feeling for laces, but he found the buttons soon enough, even with gloved fingers. His demon eyes were in shadow now, the left edge of his mask limned in red light. In the room beyond him, bodies humped and ground, slithered and sucked, and masked figures sat and sipped and toked and watched them. They were watching this too. They'd be watching Jack work. It didn't matter; he was in costume; it wouldn't give the rumors any more traction than they already had.

Daniel stood patiently and let his pants be opened. The supplies table was in arm's reach. When Jack spun him again to fuck him up against the wall, there'd be rubbers and there'd be lube. There'd also be pain; he hadn't been penetrated since he was in school. He didn't care about that either. Jack wouldn't damage him, and it wouldn't take long -- he knew how badly and how long Jack had wanted him, and anger was probably only fueling that lust. If it hurt enough, there wouldn't even be a boner for Jack to deal with afterwards.

The breeches came open but didn't slide down, too snug to fall under their own weight. The front of the hose underneath came down with a stretchy pull, and silky-warm leather slid around Daniel's dick in the shape of fingers. The contact was so intensely good that he went light-headed. Swooning at the first touch, he thought; how gauche. He pushed into it, _yeah I'm on board here get on with it_ , and the glove sank down to the base and tightened. Then _Jack_ sank down, sliding his mask up as he went so that it seemed like he was looking up at Daniel as he lowered his head, and before Daniel could do more than lift his hands to try to make the mask go back down, he'd taken Daniel's bare penis into his mouth, in his bare face.

Daniel arched against the wall, hands flailing out to either side, head clunking dully on upholstered plaster. He cried out into his closed mouth and the sound squeezed out through his nose into the humid space between his face and his mask. The warm interior of Jack's mouth enfolded his glans and the top of his shaft, gentle tongue along the underside, soft palate kissing the top, and tender suction set Daniel's whole body trembling. _My god,_ he thought, _oh my god, oh my god_ , an embittered agnostic reduced to prayer, no atheists in foxholes, no atheists in Jack O'Neill's mouth. Jack's lips were too dry to slide and his mouth must be too dry to wet them, but he didn't try to move on the shaft. Holding it still in his gloved hand, he gently sucked the glans, then loosened his lips and released it into breathy heat, and rubbed with his tongue, then sucked again, and released, and rubbed, and sucked; and each time it was the same soft, tugging, tingling pressure, the same muscular caress, the same wash of heat, steady and gentle and relentless; and Daniel thought _dancing_ and _not the same_ and came with a silent cry behind his mask, flooding Jack's mouth, gouging the drapery with his fingernails, bowed in ecstasy against the factory wall.

Jack held the load in his mouth while he drew his head back, keeping the shaft where it was with his hand, and held his lips against the tip while he swallowed, then took him in again, just the head this time. He licked around the slit and the eye, then quietly held him there in the gentle warmth of his mouth. Daniel stayed tilted into the drapes, head back, eyes closed, waiting for the fizzing hum of stunned disbelief to subside, working to swallow down the painful swell of feeling in his chest. When his penis had returned to its default state, Jack slid his mouth away and carefully, delicately put it back and put the hose back over it. He couldn't rebutton the breeches with his gloves on, and withdrew his hands, probably to take them off; Daniel looked down and did it himself, and gave Jack's mask a sloppy tap before he let his hands fall back to his sides.

Jack sat back on his calves and looked straight ahead for what felt like a long time, cloak pooled around him like a tangible shadow, hands hanging between his thighs. People were moving around, getting stuff from the supplies table, passing close enough to get a good look at his face. Daniel shifted his weight, torn between delivering a light kick and leaning down to put the goddamn thing back on Jack's face himself, and Jack's gloved hands came up and drew it down and settled it in place. He sat like that for another moment, then swiped his hat off the floor and put that back on too, and drew a leg up to plant a foot to push himself standing. Coming up was the first awkward move he'd made all night, bending forward to lean on the forearm he braced on his thigh. Daniel came off the wall with an instinct to help, but by then Jack had unfolded to six-foot-two of formidable general in imposing disguise, and he didn't need that kind of a hand. Daniel took a step and angled himself to cup Jack's package instead, offering the other kind. Jack let him for a few seconds, swallowing, before he turned his body and pulled his groin out of Daniel's reach.

Daniel folded his hands into his armpits. His energized lassitude was fading to weariness. The wrong guy had gotten off here, and he wasn't leaving until he was sure that Jack wasn't staying to have someone else give him that hand. A Zanni was starting over from across the room as if he might want to be that someone, and one of the Aristos who'd been watching from the bar was putting his drink down and getting up as if he'd be interested in some of what Daniel had just gotten, or willing to give Jack something other than a hand.

He heard a sigh gust against the inside of Jack's mask. Blocking the gestures with his body, Jack pointed to himself, mimed putting on a coat, pointed to the floor between them, and circled his upward-pointing index finger in a scaled-down rally-point signal. Daniel left his hands where they were and just nodded.

The interested Zanni wandered back out towards the dance floor. The interested Aristo followed Jack around the black hanging, and didn't follow him back in when Jack returned with a winter rain jacket over his arm under his cloak. Daniel gestured with his head: _That guy a problem?_ Jack walked two fingers through the air and held an angled palm up near the cheek of his mask: _Went off to sleep._

With a hand on his back, Jack escorted him out through the dance area, drawing looks from guests on the sofas and the promenade; pairing off after a hookup wasn't the done thing here. The music had finally swung around to the swing era, and the dance floor was hopping. The motley youth came out of his booth with Daniel's long wool coat as soon as they approached the elevator, and bowed away without seeming to expect a tip. Pushing the call button returned the sound of a faraway jangle, followed by a faint vibration of cable and counterweight. The Plague Doctor opened and closed the gate for them, but otherwise returned the elevator to the ground floor as if they weren't there. Around the bend in the hall, Jack pulled his phone out of his boot and sent a text.

"This is actually the safer exit," he said, stopping a few feet from the door, "but keep your mask on."

The sound of his voice, timbre altered by the mask but recognizably his, was both jarring and dully mundane after three hours in the realm of jazz and silence. It didn't come again; they waited without speaking, butted against opposite walls, until a return text told Jack the car had arrived.

There was a duffel in the middle of the backseat. Jack flung his gloves into it, then pulled two pairs of jeans out and tossed one at Daniel. They changed pants in a wordless rustle, knocking into the seat backs; the driver made no comment. Jack put his rolled-up breeches into the bag, then held it open for Daniel's costume. Daniel hesitated; his costume was nice work, this duffel could be bound for a trash-can fire somewhere, and if it wasn't, he questioned the wisdom of combining their stuff. In a low, wry voice, Jack said, "Not gonna _burn_ it," and Daniel deposited the blue surcoat and breeches and white hose. Jack had opted for anachronistic in the underwear department with snug boxer briefs. Daniel hadn't gone commando in a long time, and the rub of seams reminded him why.

Ten minutes away from the factory, Jack took off his _bauta_ , then pinched the contact lenses out of his eyes and cracked the window open and let the wind take them. Daniel took his mask off too, but the contacts were prescription, and he needed them to see. Jack's _tricorno_ went into the duffel upside down, the two masks nested in the crown in a bedding of mantle, the _tabarro_ tucked around, and whatever he'd done to his hair was undone with the towel and some kind of dry shampoo. It worked pretty well on Daniel's, too. Jack was apparently unprepared for removing makeup, so Daniel's eyes stayed Goth. 

The driver pulled in on a quiet side of Union Station, and they walked around the corner to the taxi stand in the rain, the duffel over Jack's shoulder. Daniel got into the first cab in the line, then turned, determined to bid Jack a polite good-night, and reared up in a discombobulated startle to find Jack shoving in right after him.

" _Oh_ yeah," Jack said, with a nodding squint and a bright, sardonic twist of lips. "We are _so_ doing this tonight." He told the driver Daniel's address, and shoved harder, to push Daniel far enough over on the worn seat that he'd have room to pull the duffel in.

Had to make the baggage fit before the door closed.

> > > > > > > > > > > > > >

Daniel liked small college towns. Before he went out exploring the universe and relocated into living history, he'd thought he'd be happy to move to one permanently. He wouldn't be, now, but Georgetown was nice, an academic enclave in a reasonably interesting city, and it was just up the Potomac from where he worked. When the gate was installed in the bowels of the Pentagon and Stargate Command's Cheyenne Mountain quarters became a training facility, his choice was to become an instructor, move East, or go offworld; he chose East, threw a dart at the Internet, and wound up in a pleasant apartment building that housed a good number of faculty. Jack called him shortsighted for putting a river between home and office; he replied that in the event of an apocalypse, the roads would be impassable, and he could just float to work. His next birthday present had been a kayak in storage with the Washington Canoe Club.

They rode up to his floor in silence; in the confines of the prosaic elevator, the scents clinging to their clothes seemed stronger than they had in the taxi, and for a moment it was like going up in the old SGC elevator, BDUs reeking of adventures on exotic worlds. He would have said _Remember that time with the stinkosaur stampede?_ , but they didn't play remember-when anymore, and he was tired, and Jack was as darkly armored as he'd ever seen him.

He let himself into the apartment, flipping the switch by the door that activated the surveillance jammers, then the identical light switch beside it. When Jack had come in past him, he closed and double-locked the door, toed off the stupid-looking and also wet costume shoes, and turned while he was shouldering out of his coat. It really did smell weird. No way was it going back in the closet. "I'm hitting the shower."

Jack dropped the duffel, dropped his jacket on top of it, and rounded on him. "Do you know how hard I've worked to protect you from association with this shit? Are you giving up common sense for Lent?"

 _Protect **me**? Are you **fucking kidding**?_ Lightly, he said, "So grab a beer, make yourself at home."

Jack stepped towards him, eyes blazing, raising a finger like the back of a hand. " _No_ more fucking around," he said.

As fast as that, Daniel was yelling. "Do you know what I'm going to have to do to protect you from _this_ shit, tonight?"

"Nothing," Jack said. His voice was flat. "You are going to have to do nothing about it because you are going to leave it the fuck alone."

"Yeah and all the whispers about us over the years, it gets out that you're doing this, how does that not wipe off on me? Whatever your goal was to protect me from _you're doing it wrong_." 

"It wouldn't have touched you. If it blows back on you now it's your own fucking fault for sticking your nose in."

Daniel let his coat fall and started for the shower. Jack blocked his way, the hall beyond him, the apartment wall on one side and the living-room furniture on the other. Shaking his head with a disgusted snort, Daniel pushed past. Jack grabbed his arm, hard, _hey I'm talking to you_ , and before he knew he'd snapped he'd thrown a full body check, rotating with the pressure on his arm and slamming his chest and hip into Jack's side, and Jack was rolling with it and countering, and a blur of shoves and forearms and elbows left them locked in a hold where the next attack from either of them was going to dislocate a joint. Jack released first, so fast that Daniel couldn't see or feel how he did it -- one second he was right there, his breath on Daniel's face, his eyes gone the soulless black of a cold killer's, and the next he was a foot away, stepping back, hands raised palm-out in front of him.

The burst of adrenaline left Daniel twice as tired as he'd been. The desire to beat the shit out of something was still there, but it wasn't directed so much at Jack. "I suppose I could have just gone around," he said wryly.

"I suppose I could have just not grabbed your arm," Jack said. Not smiling, but not harsh, either. "Sorry."

Daniel waved it away and sank down on the back of the big stuffed easy chair he hadn't gone around. Then he said fuck it and turned and slid sideways down into the chair, legs draped over the arm closest to the sofa. He'd only want to sleep after a shower, and the sooner they did this, the sooner he could do both. "Have a seat," he said. He tucked his shoulder into the squooshy back, then twisted a little more, so he could prop his head on it too.

Jack came around and sat in the middle of the sofa, then hiked his butt forward so he could slouch back. His feet came up against the magazine-piled bottom shelf of the coffee table, and since he couldn't stretch his legs out, he let them fall open. He was still wearing the white linen shirt from his costume, bloused out a little over the jeans where the scuffle had tugged it out of its tuck; unlaced at the neck, ruffled sleeves draping his wrists where his hands draped his thighs. Daniel thought he'd enjoy the view for a while before offering him something else to wear.

"So, hey, good music," Jack said, in a friendly, conversational tone.

"Seriously? We're doing the small talk _now_?"

"Leading with the violent altercation may have been unwise."

"OK. Sure. Jazz, good choice. Classy, energizing, seductive, musically references New Orleans Mardi Gras, historical origins in brothels. Word itself was originally 'jass,' Creole patois for strenuous activity or sexual intercourse, probably from the same linguistic roots that give us the word 'jism.'"

"I see why you're such a hit at cocktail parties."

"Jazz is cool. I like jazz."

"You like eighties pop-music pablum."

"I take nostalgic pleasure in the American pop-music pablum I grew up hearing in the seventies and eighties, and Chuck Mangione got his start with Art Blakey. I know we do not speak of Kenny G."

"So you know Carter's coming up for promotion."

Daniel's head came off the cushion. "Um, no, but ... yay?"

"She's on the young side, but it's not below the zone. She's more than qualified."

Combat veteran, cutting-edge scientific work, commands ranging from the flagship SGC unit through Area 51 R&D to the Atlantis expedition and _Hammond_. "She's extraordinary. This we know."

"Extraordinary isn't always good enough in this man's military."

"You're not telling me there's some gender thing."

"Not per se. But it's a thing."

"Is this about tonight somehow? Am I supposed to be making some deductive leap here? Because really, Jack, I hope you didn't follow me home just to scold me for snooping on your extracurriculars and contain the damage from that blowjob, I really sincerely hope you're going to shed _some_ kind of light on what the hell you are doing at those parties, I mean if there's some kind of back-channel networking going on I don't see why you couldn't have just told me you were on the job when I asked you about the rumors I was hearing, and if it's kink that's fine but I find it incomprehensible that you'd opt for a venue like that when -- "

"I thought it was a very nice blowjob. There's damage?"

 _It was punitive blowjob, it was 'this is what you get for following me around, you get what you want, happy now?'_ \-- except it wasn't, or that wasn't all it was, it was so much more complicated than that, and he couldn't begin to itemize the damage, and at the same time there was no damage at all, because it had never really made a difference, whether they'd had sex or they hadn't, sex was the least part of what he wanted from Jack, the intensity of his lust was inversely proportional to its significance, a blowjob was a blip on the radar ... but it had also been the sweetest, tenderest oral sex he'd ever experienced, completely out of character for the Jack he thought he knew, and it had blown his mind, and he had no intention of dealing with that right now. "You're avoiding the question."

"So are you."

"You haven't earned the answer to yours, but no, there's no damage. It was the end of a conversation. Now we're having a new one in which you tell me why I'm leaving it the fuck alone instead of pulling every string in my possession to suppress this or spin it until it disappears."

"Because I planted the rumor in the first place."

Daniel closed his eyes long enough to find out that if he slept in these contact lenses he'd most likely wake up blind. "This is not happening."

"Yeah, I tried that one when I saw you on the dance floor. Doesn't work."

Daniel elbowed himself around in the chair and leaned on his thighs. "Planted it."

"It's called disinformation."

"So you wanted to be seen there."

"I wanted credible reports of that kind of activity to spread through particular channels. I dropped a hint about my attendance to somebody I thought would run with it, but he didn't, so I showed up at one in person. Made enough of a ripple for you to pick up, but not enough to suit my purpose, so I went again tonight."

"This is _crazy_."

"This is counterintelligence. This is quarterly turnover in command of the SGC post-disclosure, and me putting a stop to it with the officer I wanted in that job all along. This is crowd-sourced scrutiny since we went public, and that weasel Bregman getting Carter flustered on camera, and that footage turning up in the dark corners of the darknet, and confidential testimony from the zatarc incident in other corners, and gaping holes in the NDAs drawn up when nobody thought we'd be declassified in our lifetimes, and people with old grudges and new money ready to capitalize on them. This is me doing what I was trained to do back in the black mists of time."

"Provide a counternarrative," Daniel said. "A counternarrative in which you are so gay you could not possibly have had an affair with Sam."

"The crazy ideas have always been the ones that saved our bacon."

"You're throwing yours into the fire."

"It's my bacon."

The knowledge that Jack was doing this with sacrifice aforethought ignited the residual anger Daniel felt at his personal recklessness into a deeper, hotter burn. "And Kerry? And your _wife_? Being bisexual does jack shit for this narrative of yours."

"Kerry's an old pal. Some things in Kerry's world get a lot better if Carter gets the SGC. Kerry dropped me because I was hung up on you, which means she even gets to leak the truth a little bit, nice change of pace for a spook -- and it'll all be over one way or another before anybody tracks Sara down. It's not about evidence. It's about counting ammo. Making sure the right shells turn up defective."

"And you can't just, oh, I don't know, _come out_?" He was shouting again, or close enough. Jack hadn't run out to hoist the rainbow flag when the ban on gays in the military ended, but at the time they'd still had a secret program to protect. There was nothing to stop him doing it now but his predilection for privacy.

"People don't believe information you hand them; you have to let them think they dug up some dirt you were trying to hide."

"Ask anybody at the SGC, you find out I'm the guy Jack O'Neill tells stuff to. Ironic, right? But easy enough to engineer a situation where I get to say 'The general and Colonel Carter? You're kidding, right? Jack's gay.'"

"This is way, way below that level. We're talking the bubbling primordial ooze of Washington gossip. This thing gets squelched down in the sludge. Before the question even forms." 

Daniel took a breath. It didn't help. He rubbed his eyes, and his fingers came back black, as if to illustrate Jack's metaphor. "I have to take a shower."

"Knock yourself out."

He looked up, squinting through the stuff he'd smeared on his contacts. "Come in with me."

Jack squinted back at him.

"Not for sex, Jack. To save time so I can get to sleep sometime tonight." He pushed out of the chair and half tripped over the arm of it turning to head for the bathroom.

"Good plan," Jack said, and followed him down the hall.

No point trying to salvage the lenses. Daniel tossed them, started the shower running, and stripped down while the water got warm. "The incriminating material you're talking about is _nothing_." He stuffed the jeans of unknown provenance and the costume shirt into the hamper. Jack was sitting on the toilet lid, one arm propped on the sink. "She got flustered because questions like that flustered her, she had a crush on you and it embarrassed her and I think he blindsided her with a sexism she'd forgotten even existed." He stepped under the water, slid the glass door closed enough to keep the spray in, and grabbed the soap. The first year of the program she'd have ripped Bregman a new one, but she'd gotten soft, the chip on her shoulder dissolved by years of working in a true meritocracy. They got vulnerable in such weird ways, all of them, over those years. "You guys got flagged by the zatarc detector because you were the ones with the guilt complex." He wasn't sure if the eyeliner was water-soluble, but soaping and rinsing his face felt fantastic. "We were all too invested. We all stayed when Sam got trapped. Teal'c and I just had no problem with it. You and Sam knew that if it went on record as an attachment issue, they could break up the team."

Poking at the Softsoap dispenser, Jack said something about her missing her calling in something, but Daniel was rinsing an ear and missed it.

"In what?"

"In espionage," Jack said, raising his voice. "Coaching me to play that as a romantic attachment was a brilliant recovery." He got up and slid the shower door back enough to stick his face in. "But listen to how complicated all this sounds -- and we were _there_." He watched Daniel soap under his arms and between his legs. "You try explaining it in response to a direct question, all you do is look defensive, and by the time they're asking the questions out loud the damage is done anyway." He pulled his face back as Daniel's rinsing sent deflected spray all over the place, but kept watching him half through the misted glass. "'The only way to win is to deny it battle' -- that kid was a pain in the ass, but he had that right."

Daniel scrubbed shampoo through his hair. "Jack, I was _right here_. If you wanted to spread your big gay rumor all you had to do was -- "

"Protecting. You. From. That."

"From _what_? I'm a civilian, I'm -- "

"From consequences that still suck enough to fill that party's guest list once a month. This is a dirty, crappy, fucked-up world, Daniel. You lose sight of that sometimes, holed up in the SGC."

Daniel took his point; he'd been thinking the same thing about Sam, although she'd grown a whole new exoskeleton on Atlantis and in the space fleet. He rinsed his hair, turned off the water, slid the glass door aside, and stood there dripping. "I'm not that kind of public figure."

Jack snagged the towel off the bar and handed it to him. "The brilliant, modest, unflappable blue-eyed boy who made the world believe the U.S. military could be trusted with the stargate until the U.N. could figure out where they want it?"

Blotting himself dry, Daniel thought, _The arrogant, fatigued middle-aged guy who sold the lesser of many evils_. He blew air through his lips and stepped out of the tub, headed for the bedroom and his own clothes.

Jack followed him through the two doorways and plopped down on the bed as he was getting his glasses out of the case he'd left on the dresser. "The eloquent, compelling diplomat who stood up in Geneva and the General Assembly and Congress and kept the third world war from breaking out?"

"Yes that's very nice of you, Jack, but what you and I know I did is not remotely -- "

"It makes you exactly that kind of public figure, whatever it feels like to you since you retracted back into your lab, and it makes you a target for the dirty crappy world's stupid lurid crappy shit."

Daniel turned from the dresser drawer he'd opened with a sweatshirt in his hand. "And how the hell was blowing me in front of roomful of people sheltering me from homophobic fallout?"

Jack sat back and crossed his arms and legs in satisfaction, as if he'd made his point, which made no sense to Daniel. Daniel tossed the sweatshirt in his general direction, and he snatched it out of the air without blinking. "Kept you from taking that goddamn mask off, for one thing. For another, it got people on your side who were not on your side when you were walking around like a tourist." He pulled the costume blouse off over his head, said "Thanks," and punched into the sweatshirt, arms first, then head. "For a third, it showed that you belong to me. Well, that and the display of leaving with me right after."

"And that was the only reason you cut in when you did, huh?" He pulled on a fresh, clean, heavenly pair of twenty-first-century underwear, and Jack got up to go down the hall and put the last of his costume into the duffel. It was a small apartment, and a short hall, just the bathroom alongside the kitchen on one side, the bedroom at the end. He didn't have to raise his voice much to finish, "Nothing to do with me letting somebody get more handsy than you were comfortable with?"

Jack wandered into the kitchen. "You didn't look like you were having a very good time."

"I was trying to."

"If only I could tell you who it was who had you by the balls."

"I'd honestly rather not know." He heard the fridge open and close, two bottles click-hiss open. In T-shirt, sweats, and socks, he headed back towards the living room, and Jack met him at the kitchen entryway with two Cokes, and handed him one.

"You were gonna bolt the minute you saw me anyway. Couldn't chase you if you did. Figured I'd grab you before you had the chance."

"And you were pissed."

In a soft drawl, Jack said, "You have no idea."

Daniel kept standing there, drink in hand, when he should have moved away, a little mesmerized and more than a little taken aback by it, all things considered. "About as pissed as I was, I'd say." Walking around like a tourist? Getting people on his side who were not on his side? Not enough of a ripple to suit his purpose the first time he went? "And what a stroke of luck that someone you wanted happened to walk onto that dance floor just when your tourist visa was expiring."

Jack's head tilted up, a dark, sad smile in his eyes. "Hey, I'm a lucky guy."

No, he was a resourceful commando, using whatever weapons came to hand. But confirmation that he was Jack's only front-room encounter in either visit cast things in a different light. The physicality of the angry cocktease had escalated in a series of exchanges, and he was thinking, now, that it wouldn't have come to sex if he hadn't put Jack against that wall and gone to his knees. He wasn't sorry he'd pushed it; Jack had kept him out of the loop, and he'd done what made sense to him given what he knew. But he was finally finding in himself some compassion for the price Jack had paid. Empathy: the turning point between conflict and compromise.

The raw lust that had characterized their confrontation at the otherworldly dance paled in comparison with the tension of their proximity in the plain little hall of his little apartment, in casual clothes, soft drinks sweating in their hands. He turned, willfully breaking the spell, and went around to the iPod in its dock on top of the receiver in the living room. The surveillance jammer always left him feeling vaguely itchy, and if he fed it some extra sound, the itchiness stopped. He swiped down to a mellow saxophone mix. No pyrotechnic virtuosity, but a good sampling of Jack's favorite players.

Jack had come around to sit at the end of the sofa nearest the stuffed chair. "Why, thank you, Daniel," he said, when Charlie Parker obligingly filled the room.

"Their playlist neglected the bebop era."

"Bird's not for dancing."

"And yet," Daniel said, sitting beside him on the not-very-long sofa instead of back in the chair, "the dance continues."

Quiet, a little wary, Jack said, "The damage isn't that done."

"The damage you're talking about hasn't even begun," Daniel said, with some heat. OK, yeah, still pissed, for all he sympathized. "Do you even know if Sam _wants_ the SGC command?"

"I don't play games with stuff like that anymore."

The coy manipulations of Jack's early months at Homeworld were far in the past, but they'd left enough scars for Daniel to say, "You asked her?"

"Daniel, I've been asking her once a year since I took that command myself. Back then we had a long, frank discussion about the options and the timeline. I told her that one of these years she'd get a message that said, 'Still want it?' I sent that message last fall, and the answer was yes. I confirmed it in person when we took her out for her birthday. She wants the job."

It would bring her full circle back to the Pentagon. She'd have to retire her commission to stay in the position once the U.N. took over, the same as Jack, but the transition Daniel had negotiated was a three-year plan, and they were barely a year into it. Plenty of time for her to fix what the string of three-month-wonder generals had broken; Daniel had been getting concerned about how they were going to get the place in condition to be transferred, and this was how.

"OK," he said. He lifted the Coke bottle off his thigh, where it had bled condensation through his sweats, took a couple of swallows, and put it on a coaster. "I respect what you're doing. I hope your strategy works. I applaud the objective and I'll celebrate when it's achieved."

"Glad to hear it." Jack got up. Over the years of being a general, he'd become accustomed to declaring meetings closed by simply rising to his feet. He had delivered his reprimand, briefed Daniel on his plan, and heard a satisfactory level of acceptance. His work here was done, and Daniel was expected to drop the matter as instructed.

Daniel made not the slightest move to rise. "But."

Jack made a sound midway between a groan and a warning growl.

Daniel looked up at him. "Didn't you ever wonder why I never pushed?"

"Don't push, Daniel. Not now. Not after all this."

"Because you'll cave like a caving thing. I know. I've always known that. So why do you think I never did?"

Jack shook his head, a mixture of _don't do this_ and _isn't it obvious?_ and _I don't know_.

"I never wondered why you didn't come out after repeal and disclosure. If you were holding your orientation in reserve as a kind of leverage, preparing to weaponize bigotry against bigotry, I didn't know that, and I don't even think you were -- I think you felt resistance when you started the gears turning for Sam's promotion, and you did a threat assessment and looked around for a suitable weapon and there it was. But I never wondered, not even when other flag officers came out. I figured you considered your private life to be nobody's business, and I accepted that I wasn't part of it that way. But there was no private life, was there? You haven't been with anybody since the second time I ascended."

"So? I fucked enough people in the course of two careers and a randy life. I can't take a break?"

"So now I know why. I know why you didn't come out and why you never made a move on me. I'm the one you wanted, but we've been through enough in the last few years, you know how miserable I was in the limelight, and you refused to drag me through the wringer. So you kept your distance and you kept me in the dark." He got up and stood hipshot, his hands free. "Why do you think I never made a move on you?"

Jack didn't bother with a detour through _how the hell do I know_. "Turning out to be trying to spare each other the same goddamn thing doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do."

"Nope. It's not the right thing to do all by itself."

"If I'm outted while I'm still wearing those stars, I'm taking one for the team in a way that makes a difference. One last service for my brothers and sisters in uniform. There's a _point_ to it, and I can take the hit. I can spare the time. You, not so much."

"I traded an ivory tower for a concrete silo. You pointed that out yourself. I'll just sit in my lab and make sure not to read the comments sections of the online blogs."

With a harsh exasperation Daniel hadn't heard since they were on gate missions together, Jack said, "I wanted you out of this."

"Well, I put myself in it. You and me, Jack. Since the first step we took through the stargate, that's what it's always come down to."

"Daniel ... " Jack's tone carried all his longing and reluctance, all his doubt and need, all his caveats and protests, all the things he wanted for Daniel and all the things he didn't, a universe of intentions and consequences playing out in the two syllables of Daniel's name.

With warm, conclusive certainty, Daniel said, "Jack."

Jack looked at him for a long time -- still considering at first, still fighting it, eyes roving over Daniel's face, searching for any crack in Daniel's confidence or desire; then dipping lower, taking him in, chest and arms and belly and hips and crotch and thighs, devouring him with a heat that radiated into everything he was looking at. When his gaze came up, the hard, transparent mask of his features softened, and his mouth bowed in the beginnings of a smile, and he said, "Well, I wouldn't mind doing you while you still have that stuff on your eyes."

Daniel took a step closer. "Didn't come off, huh?"

"Most of it did," Jack said, voice dropping lower. "Some of it stayed."

Daniel fit his body to the front of Jack's. Put his hands on Jack's hips, palming the hard bones through the denim. Pressed his groin into Jack's groin, mushing the bulges together. No grinding; he'd need a few Tylenol before a reprise of any hip action. Stillness was better for feeling. Warm belly, heavy package, long thighs, a knock of knees as Jack shifted to get their lower bodies even closer. Jack's arms hung relaxed at his sides, but he wasn't passive. His hips pressed Daniel's. A slight tilt of his chin offered his mouth. Daniel brought his close enough to breathe on it through his parted lips. 

Jack was watching them, eyes lowered. The characteristic outward curve of the middle of his lashes was beautifully familiar against the line of his cheekbones. His bare face was angular, beard-shadowed, grooved. His lips parted, taking in Daniel's next breath. The sharp line of his lower lip touched the middle of Daniel's lower lip, stroked minutely back and forth. A shivering twinge ran down Daniel's body, and his genitals stirred against Jack's. The combined warmth increased to heat.

He touched his mouth to Jack's. The first contact was a tiny psychic shock, the fleshy reality of a kiss after all the years and all these past hours, the actual feel of Jack's lips against his. He'd never fantasized this; he'd fantasized Jack's open mouth plundering his during sex, wet probing tongue and dominating control, but a kiss had seemed too forward a thing to conjure in his mind without the permission of Jack there kissing back, and he hadn't been able to imagine it anyway, not what it would really feel like. Jack's lips were warm and dry, thin on top and angled on the bottom; his own lips were rounder, his upper lip fuller, and pressing them to the sharp lines of Jack's came with the startling tenderness of comforting someone with a blanket. Then Jack's mouth softened, opened, adjusted to fit, Jack tilted his head just slightly to the side and returned some pressure, and the strangeness melted into a wondrous new familiarity, a melding of soft fleshy warmth, the scent of sunshine in Jack's skin in the middle of the night. Jack's nose brushed his cheekbone, feathery breaths on light stubble. His eyes slid closed as he drank the sensations in.

They kissed that way for a long time, pressing and easing, shifting angles, exploring shape and taste. He thought Jack might be leaving time for him to reconsider; he knew that he was waiting for Jack to step back when he felt his own hands reflexively gather fistfuls of denim at Jack's hips, and at some point Jack's left hand had moved to the small of his back, over his shirt, a faint echo of a dance hold that could have been a polite point of contact but came through to Daniel as a plea for him not to pull away, a gesture as light and undemanding as it was desperate. They'd stepped toward each other so many times in so many ways, and backed off in so many more ways than that. For long minutes, they did nothing but touch lips and not back off, proving a negative over and over again, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat. Then Jack's hand slid up under his T-shirt, bare palm over his bare abs, bare fingers over his ribcage, bare fingertips brushing a nipple, and he writhed with unbearable arousal and pushed Jack's mouth all the way open, plunged in deep.

Jack's tongue met his, hot and muscular, slippery with spit he hadn't swallowed while they were kissing, and this wasn't kissing now, it was devouring, eating out each other's mouths in a groaning, ravenous orgy of sucking and thrusting. Daniel rolled his hips, trying to imprint the shape of Jack's erection on the crease of his groin and bury his hard-on deeper in Jack's crotch at the same time. It felt as if all the muscle in Jack's body roused at once as he grabbed Daniel's ass to jam them tighter at the hips and bore down on Daniel's mouth with all the strength in his neck, the plundering hot dominating control of Daniel's fantasy. Jack had blown him with this mouth, taken his glans into where his tongue was now, applied tender suction where now he was probing and penetrating, and when Jack withdrew his tongue to suck the whole of Daniel's into his mouth, the memory and fantasy mouths were sucking him too.

Daniel dragged his arms up out of the surrounding lock of Jack's and got one hand into his hair, one on the back of his neck. The military cut was too short to grasp but he closed his fist in it anyway, spiky tufts between his fingers, fine silk sticky with dry shampoo residue, should have dragged him into that shower but then he wouldn't smell of smoke and leather and new sweat over old, and the scent of him was more intoxicating than the druggy miasma. Jack took the grip as a signal to release Daniel's tongue, which was OK because Daniel had to swallow or choke on his own spit. Daniel tightened the hand at Jack's nape and came out of his swallow nipping and sucking at Jack's lips, Jack's philtrum, Jack's chin before he took Jack's mouth again and pushed his tongue back in.

It wasn't enough. He could stay here forever, locked against Jack's body, fucking Jack's mouth and being fucked by Jack's tongue, but he couldn't get enough of him this way, too much cloth and too much effort against gravity, too awkward an angle to get at his dick. He dragged his mouth away to get it on Jack's neck, stretched the sweatshirt collar wide to get at the soft spot where it joined his shoulder, sucked his way up the long tendon, tilted his head and nudged Jack's chin up to get at his Adam's apple, his windpipe, but it was too limited a selection of body parts; he wanted full access, lying down.

"Come into the bedroom," he moaned against Jack's ear, hot and breathless, losing consonants. "Let me lay you out naked. Let me see you come." Jack made a low noise into his neck and squeezed his ass in a crushing grip, and he writhed again at the doubled pressure on penis and glutes and said, "I'll come like this, god, please, not dressed, not standing."

"You'll bail," Jack said, gruff and clipped, forcing it out like an admission, pissed at having to use words because Daniel wasn't getting the crushing message in his hands.

"I live here," Daniel said, laughing now, bending his upper body back to bring his elbows down between them and get both hands on the sides of Jack's head. Through nipping, laughing kisses, eyebrows and cheekbones and the crease of nose, he said, "I live here, you faithless idiot, I'm not going anywhere, _I'm trying to bring you further inside_." He released Jack's face and reached behind to pry Jack's hands off his ass, grasping them firmly as he stepped back, keeping hold of the right as he eased his hand from the left so that he could turn and lead, _not letting go_ , watching Jack's face with what he hoped was reassuring fondness somewhere in whatever the throes of lust were doing to his expression.

"Not what I mean," Jack said, almost a moan, but there was acquiescence in his features and his limbs and Daniel turned and led him around the furniture and down the hall, willing his penis and his scrotum to ignore the rub and tug of his own clothes at every step. He ignored the swipe Jack made at the light switch on his way by, and drew him down onto the bed in a gloriously awkward boyish jumble of arms and legs, should strip him standing but he wasn't sure they'd make it free of all the clothes anyway and however close they got to bare he wanted it to be horizontal, he'd had enough vertical for a lifetime.

He got braced on an elbow and fumbled and tugged at Jack's fly. Jack's upper body rose in a sweeping situp that dislodged his hand, and when Jack bent to drag his boots off he pulled his hand out of the crunch and took the opportunity to get out of his shirt. He tried to do it without sitting up, and wound up falling back in a temporary tangle; when he'd gotten free of the shirt and flung it away, Jack had already arched back to push jeans and boxers down and was rolling forward to get them the rest of the way off. Daniel started on his sweats and briefs while Jack stripped the sweatshirt off, but he'd only gotten them to mid-thigh when Jack came back down and rolled him up onto his side with an encircling arm, full against the front of his body. All the breath went out of him as their dicks knocked together inside a sandwich of bare flesh, and he was only peripherally aware of Jack's lower arm burrowing under his side, trying to get around him. He lifted a little, to help, but he was clobbered by the gestalt of erect and naked Jack hauling him close in his bed, dark burning eyes and chiseled features, soft furring of hair between brown nipples, shoulder muscles flexing under bare skin. He was taken completely by surprise when Jack locked arms around him at back and tailbone and rolled him on top.

His cotton-sheathed legs slid down to either side of Jack's bare legs, his knees seeking purchase. His bunched waistbands came up under his balls as his thighs spread, pushing his package up into the pressing swell of their bellies, and he was slow getting his hands planted, gasping at the rub of body hair and the drag of skin over tacky swollen flesh as he pushed up to look down at Jack. 

"Yeah," Jack breathed, before he could ask or say anything about the position, and smiled at him, mouth and eyes, a gleam of teeth, a sweet smile so rarely seen and so wholly Jack that there was nothing he could do but smile back, even while he was searching Jack's face, off balance and uncertain, not entirely sure what he was doing up here. He gave a slow, experimental thrust, all hip rotation, not putting his back or his thighs into it, and lost focus for a couple of seconds, overloaded by the effect the movement had on the assemblage of genitals trapped between them. He bent his head and got a glimpse of Jack's cock next to his, the eye looking back at him, tip peeking up higher than his between them. Long, god he was long, he was long when he was soft and longer when he was hard and Daniel wanted all of that up inside him, all of that all the way up inside him, and his ass contracted as if he could pull Jack up into him just by thinking about it. Jack breathed "Yeah" again as he thrust again, a little more oomph to it, a little harder, as much to see and feel his skin rub against Jack's dick as to get friction on his own.

Jack kept making encouraging noises, so he kept doing it, and found his way into an easy, rolling rhythm. He was so aroused that even the protest of sore muscles was a sexual stimulation, and it faded as he kept moving, subsumed into the rolling pleasure and the heat of the blood under his skin. Jack's hands roamed freely, exploring his chest and his arms, his neck and his ears, his back and his sides. He'd always loved having Jack's hands on him; they'd stopped touching each other after a few years, tacit agreement to minimize the torture, and his thrusts tailed off as the warm sweep of palms and fingers put him into a half trance. Watching his face, Jack left off the exploration and started teasing him instead. Light pinches around his nipples, a long stroke down the vulnerable hollow of this throat between his collarbones, feathery caresses across his lips, a finger into his mouth when he jerked and cried out at the swirl of another fingertip over his cockhead. He took the finger in and suckled it while Jack rubbed more deeply into his nipples, thumbing friction heat into one, tugging the other with twisting pinches. The gleaming smile in Jack's eyes would have told him he was flushing even if he hadn't felt the heat spreading through his face, down his neck and chest.

He slid his mouth off the finger to say "My turn," to dismount and start getting his mouth on all the parts of Jack he hadn't been able to reach, and Jack said, "Stay there. Bring your knees up a little." It was an easygoing instruction, but it sent a deeper flush of heat through him, a hint of how much he'd enjoy it if Jack turned out to be willing to give orders in bed. He complied, watching Jack watch his cock and balls come into full view, pushed up and out by the bunched clothes, suspended over Jack's erection. A little color rose into Jack's cheeks, a sight Daniel had never expected to see; Jack had no blush reflex that he knew of, and he didn't redden from drink or exertion, capillaries hidden deep under thick skin, his only visible vascularity the long veins in arms and shoulders and the small veins in the backs of his hands. The cascade of sparks when they first laid eyes on each other should have blackened the walls of the old SGC; he'd always known how attractive he was to Jack; he'd been looking right into the dark lust in Jack's eyes half the night, and feeling Jack bone-hard against his groin; but it was thrilling to see that bright, faint evidence of how much he turned Jack on.

Jack ran a hand up his right arm and tapped the inner bend of his elbow. He took his weight off the arm, and Jack guided that hand down between them, shifted his hold to slide it under his penis. Daniel closed his fingers loosely around the long shaft, all he could manage as the smooth veined weight of it came into his palm for the first time, and Jack breathed "Yeah" again, then "Oh, fuck, yeah" as Daniel came back on-line and took him in a more purposeful hold. Jack's eyes slid briefly shut as Daniel gave a long, slow pull, but then he was watching again, with keen intensity, his focus shifting back and forth between Daniel's hand on him and Daniel's hanging cock.

"This is how you want to get off?" Daniel asked, pulling steadily but not sure how much pressure to exert.

"First of many many ways," Jack said. "That OK with you?"

"Everything's OK as long as it's both of us in it together," Daniel said without thinking, and then was aware of a vague surprise that he still felt so strong a need to make that point, as absorbed as he was with the sensation of touching Jack's penis and the question of how Jack wanted it to be touched.

"Message received," Jack said, a little breathlessly as Daniel squeezed a little tighter. "No more politics while you're giving me an orgasm."

"Is this good?" he asked, going a little faster.

"Tighter," Jack said. "Harder."

The position Jack had put him in was good, and with a slight adjustment it was perfect, his arm at almost the same angle as when he masturbated. No risk of muscle fatigue, and complete control over what he was doing. The motion _felt_ like masturbating, right down to the jiggling mattress, and cued his body to expect stimulation that it wasn't getting, which made his pushed-up cock and balls feel even more distended and engorged, even more on display for Jack.

He worked up to about as hard as he ever went on himself, and Jack let out a harsh breath and said, "More. A lot more. Hard and fast." Jack raised his knees a little to spread them, maybe too much rubbing on his balls or just a need to dig in with his heels, and gripped Daniel's bracing arm at the wrist. The grip tightened and his face tightened as Daniel jerked him in a very tight fist. He groped sloppily up over Daniel's juddering shoulder to lay his hand on the side of Daniel's head, palm hot on his cheek, fingers light on his ear. Daniel realized that he'd never taken his glasses off when Jack's thumb stroked the earpiece as if they were a part of his body. Jack said his name in a soft, hoarse voice. He was looking into Daniel's eyes, had been for a while; Daniel wasn't sure when that had happened. Daniel felt the approach of Jack's climax as if it were his own, his dick tightening down, his balls pulling up, an acute swelling of ecstasy deep in his pelvis. Jack said "Oh, god, _god_ ," and then cried out and bucked up into Daniel's hand, shooting in long spurts. His eyes winced down to glittering dark slits, but he kept them open, just barely.

Daniel couldn't. He dropped his head and came with a sobbing groan, spilling into the come on Jack's belly, then thrusting into it when Jack surged up to collect him and pull him down, a push on his braced elbow to collapse the arm, a shove on his right thigh to slide it back. His glasses pulled off his face on his way to burying it between Jack's head and the pillow, and he felt them topple from Jack's chest into the curve of neck by his chin. He kept pumping through the slick spread of semen, spasmodic jerks of his hips that he felt echoed in jolts through Jack's body because he was thrusting across Jack's dick. _Too much_ , he thought, trying to still himself, but Jack's arms, around his arms, held him tight, and one hand was pressed flat on the small of his back, encouraging him to thrust all he needed to. He slowed it down to gentle pushes that felt intensely sweet to him, the slippery slide of still orgasmic flesh, but might not feel so great to Jack. He stopped moving, and then there was just the rise and fall of their breathing, gradually evening out, and Jack's heartbeat against his chest, gradually slowing.

He lay tilted and slightly askew on top of Jack, one leg and one arm stretched down and flat, the other arm bent up under Jack's elbow, the other knee still drawn partway up. The press of half-hard penises between them in the thick mess of come felt spongy and wonderful, then squishy and wonderful as they softened. His sac hung deflated; he couldn't tell if it was lying on Jack's. He took a deep breath, drinking in the scent of musk and sweat and heated skin, and let it out in a long shudder. Jack eased the grip of his arms, first to rescue Daniel's glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand, then to run his palms in long, warm, slow strokes down Daniel's back and flanks. Daniel let go of the fistful of quilt he'd had in a death grip in his left hand. He tilted his head up a little to lay a soft kiss on Jack's jaw, and felt it contract in a smile, and let his head drop again.

"Well," Jack said, after a while. "Sixteen years. Guess that wasn't totally unexpected."

"I came in your _mouth_ and _you_ didn't go off."

He felt Jack smile again. "Couldn't see your face."

The display and the hand motion had contributed, but he really had come just from Jack letting him see his O face. Thoughts of privacy and exposure were drifting lazily through his mind as he shifted to the side, intending to push out of the sweats and briefs and get something to wipe up with. Jack tensed -- not much, but perceptibly -- and the things he'd dismissed in the heat of the moment mixed into his general musings and coalesced into a clear picture.

Jack hadn't pulled him on top just because he liked being on the bottom. 'You'll bail' hadn't been Jack's last-gasp articulation of their shared fear of second thoughts.

He got the rest of his clothes off. He considered saying something, then tucked back against Jack's side, in the curve of his arm. The slight tension in Jack relaxed. Daniel trailed his fingers through the come on Jack's belly, and Jack gently, casually grasped his hand and moved it up to his chest.

"You looked really fucking scary with those gold lenses," he said, continuing the conversation.

"You should see 'em in blacklight."

"Maybe sometime when I'm not half stoned."

"You have a lower tolerance for weed than booze."

"Mm-hm. Lightweight all around."

"You looked really weird with my eyes."

"They weren't your eyes. They were a flat dark brown. Yours are almost amber sometimes." After the slightest of pauses, he added, "Up close, in the light."

"I'm a little uncomfortable with you seeing everything else up close in the light."

It was the admission Daniel had manufactured an opening for, but it was as strange to hear Jack say it as to realize Jack felt it. He'd known very few people as comfortable in their own skins as Jack.

"You realize that's a compliment," Jack said. "Wouldn't give a rat's ass with anyone else." While Daniel was working to construct a response of exquisite sensitivity and tact, Jack went on, "I'll get over it. I apologize for the hyperbole in my moment of freakage. I know you won't bail."

"And you realize that as payback for not trusting in my love for you I'm already planning to have my depraved way with every inch of you that you're hinky about."

Smiling, Jack turned on his side, facing him, leaving his arm stretched out under Daniel's neck, not coincidentally opening the whole length of himself to view. "Had myself convinced it was too late anyway. Waited too long, best years of our lives, yadda." He reached a hand up and stroked around Daniel's eyes -- where the remains of the liner were, Daniel thought, and then felt that Jack's fingertips were tracing the shape of his glasses. "I wanted you on top. I also wanted you to come before you got an eyeful. Hell, _I_ wanted to come before you got an eyeful, in case you reacted some way that might make me go soft. Selfish and scared kept us out of this room for a long time. But old habits die hard."

Daniel stroked his knuckles along the trail of sticky hair leading up from Jack's groin, exploring the direction of growth, smoothing the rucked places. Jack's belly contracted, hard abs under the paunch, and Daniel felt a flush of heat in his loins at the prospect of thrusting to orgasm in that combination of yielding flesh and muscular resistance. "I've got an insta-fetish for this, and it's a thing of beauty with two loads on it."

"Feels kinda good, you messing with it," Jack said, sounding a little surprised.

Daniel stroked again, higher, and got the same reflexive contraction. "So that's an arousal response?"

"Not just from me, by the looks of it."

Daniel reached down and found himself starting to firm. "Wow," he said. "Doubt it's gonna return to useability any time soon though."

"Lot of hinky ground to cover, plenty of time," Jack said, and kissed Daniel on the mouth -- an easy, casual kiss, as if they kissed routinely, as if they'd ever kissed before an hour ago. "Right now I gotta pee."

He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom with no evident self-consciousness at all -- not, Daniel knew, because that issue was past, but because he was Jack, and he wouldn't show it, no matter how acutely he felt it. Daniel stroked himself lightly while Jack took his leak, teasing his cock and trying to tickle his balls awake, but it was nothing doing; at forty-seven, his days of coming back in under an hour were behind him. Water ran in the bathroom sink, Jack washing his hands and, sadly, probably also rinsing the front of himself, and Daniel got up and turned the covers down, knowing that even in the well-heated apartment Jack would need something over him if he was going to sleep with nothing on. When Jack came back into the room, he was lying on his usual side of the bed, arms behind his head, wondering if he should throw some breakfast together before they crashed.

There was no smoky cone of light, just dawn starting to blush against the blinds, but Jack stopped a yard shy of the foot of the bed, looked fondly down at Daniel reclining in his semi-flaccid nudity, then composed his features and stood still for Daniel's inspection.

He was the picture of relaxed virility. Breathtakingly handsome. Fine lush hair adorably tousled. Limbs and torso holding the memory of last summer's sun, deliciously pale within his swim-trunk lines, the drape of his long penis in beautiful proportion to his long, muscular legs, his long, athletic build. The padding only made Daniel hungry to get his hands on it, his mouth, his dick. He dragged his gaze up by force before he was finished having his look, sixteen years' worth of thirst for the sight of this and nowhere near done drinking it in, but wanting everything he was feeling to show in his eyes as he raised them to meet Jack's, every ounce of hunger, every drop of thirst, every lick of flame.

Jack wasn't watching his face. Jack's gaze was fixed lower than that. Daniel followed it down, and saw that his dick had come rigidly erect, so hard it was curving up from the cradle of his thighs.

"See?" he said, redundant, triumphant, gesturing to it with both hands. "See? See?"

"That's an eyeful," Jack agreed, and finally broke into a smile.

Hard for the second time in forty minutes, untouched except by the sight of Jack standing naked in front of him. Maybe there was a beneficent power out there somewhere. If there was, it loved Jack as much as he did.

Jack made a flamboyant return to the bed, smiling and quietly playful, _happy_ , and Daniel thought, _This. This is Jack, dancing_ , and took him into his arms.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

**Author's Note:**

> For Joy, who asked for adult, mature Jack and Daniel, sexual content, and a costume ball, with no bodyswitching or genderswitching. The costume ball got a little wild, Daniel does wear some eyeliner (Penknife's 'Unmask' put that in my head* and I couldn't get it out), and I'm not sure they're quite acting like mature adults a lot of the time, but I hope you like it, Joy!
> 
> Set around the first week of February 2013, on a timeline in which S7 'Inauguration' took place in January 2005, the stargate was moved to the Pentagon (as implied in a blog comment by one of the ptb) around 2008, canon ended with SGU S2 in 2010, the implementation of DADT repeal was in September 2011, and the Stargate Program was disclosed to the public in 2012, during Henry Hayes' last year in office.
> 
> *Eyeliner groundwork also laid by Synecdochic's JD.


End file.
